David Brooks: ‘More people own ferrets than watch Fox News’

What happens when you get a few “intellectuals” together? You get a few critical shots at things with mass appeal.

Over the last two weeks, Bloomberg Television has been airing the “Intelligence Squared” debate held in New York City earlier this month with thought leaders like Arianna Huffington, Zev Chafets, P.J. O’Rourke and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

During this debate, at issue was whether the “conflict” in political discourse was creating highly polarized political parties. Brooks linked this “conflict” to Fox News and host Glenn Beck.

“I believe in conflict, I’m a columnist, conflict is fine with me,” Brooks said. “And I’m fine with that as long as it’s constructive. The problem is we have parties that don’t represent the country. We now have — here’s a fact from Morris Fiorina, Stanford political scientist: More people own ferrets than watch Fox News.”

Brooks argued that the two major parties are controlled by elements not representative of the country.

“We have a [Republican] Party that’s sort of dictated by that small group, and in the Democratic Party we have a party dictated by the public-sector employee unions,” he said. “And you’ve got vast numbers of people whose views are not basically represented, so the country is still a bell curve country, and the rest of the — and the two-party system is not.”